My Saturday has begun with reading the NYT feature on ABBA's comeback and the many comments. It occurred to me that a current megatrend is adjusting to aging musicians' physical being in the world and how that contrasts with their younger selves.
My take: How *TF* (shouting a little here) do I get to tell Bono what he should look like, how much he should weigh or what he should wear? He can have all the money and power in the world, but he is still entitled to basic human autonomy. If I happen to vibe with his style, great. I don't see how I get to tell him that his sunglasses are wrong, his hair is bad, or his Guinness gut overly voluminous.
How would I feel if he told me "Don't wear those stupid pants to my concert?" Would I still eagerly slap down the credit card for the ticket? If there is a "contract" between me as ticket buyer and him as performer, it is that we both show up at the appointed time and place and he sings the songs while I stand and listen.
In the JT30 show he was very winded and out of breath during "Running to Stand Still" (from his exertion during "Bullet"), to the extent that I was vaguely shocked. Typically a live performance will be configured to either prevent or mask the singer brushing up against this physical constraint. I might cite this as an example of a failing of the concert's stage direction, while possibly appreciating the realness of the live performance.
Bono's job is to show up and sing the songs. Let him get even balder and fatter for all I care, as long as he structures the concert to showcase his vocal talent to the best of his ability. Time is not any body's friend. It was mentioned that Bono was hottest during ZooTV, I would say Joshua Tree (and perhaps he shouldn't have cut his mane quite so short while he still had it in the nineties), but during the Zoo era he was already paying someone to fluff his thinning hair just right between songs. For me, the Elevation tour was the sweet spot of his youthful physical appearance with fewer insufferable onstage mannerisms.
I indulge in this hypocrisy only to prove a point--how well did he sing in the Achtung era? Very well indeed. The musicians were still adjusting to the technology and there is, for example, a distracting click track bleep on "Even Better than the Real Thing" audible in good bootlegs. They will be able to go back to those songs in the likely reboot tour and present them live much better now from a purely musical standpoint. Whether Bono pays a physical trainer to get him into peak state or is rolled out onstage in a wheelchair wearing a diaper, all I ask is that he nail the songs.
